Mascia Bedendo wins FMA Europe Best Pitch Award

30 June 2017

Mascia Bedendo (Institute of Finance) has been awarded the Best Pitch Award in the Behavioral Finance Elevator Pitch session at the 2017 FMA Europe meeting in Lisbon for the article "Cultural Traits and Corporate Debt Financing".

The paper, that won the Best Pitch Award,is co-authored with Emilia Garcia-Appendini (University of St. Gallen) and Linus Siming (Institute of Finance, Audencia Business School). The study documents that firm managers with different cultural backgrounds who live side-by-side can display significant differences in corporate financing decisions. The authors exploit cultural differences within a geographical area that shares a common regulatory, institutional, and macroeconomic framework: The autonomous province of South Tyrol in Northern Italy, which is mainly comprised of individuals from either an Italian or a Germanic cultural background. Firms with managers from the Italian group are less capitalized than firms run by managers from the Germanic group. This difference in capitalization translates into a more intense use of informal sources of financing: Firms run by CEOs of Italian origin resort significantly more to trade credit as a source of financing, and are willing to lend more credit to their customers.